The Weekly Screed (#763)

I wanna be Donny’s girl
by David Benjamin

“Dowd is rooting for the bear… She’ll criticize Trump, but ultimately, she’s OK with him, because he plays his gender role in what she has decreed to be an appropriate manner. He’s a boor, a rogue, a bully and a jerk, but…  he’s a man, and that’s what men are supposed to be like in Dowd’s retrograde view of men and women’s roles in the world.”
— Jonathan Shurberg

MADISON, Wis. — Maureen Dowd, a fixture on the New York Times venerable op-ed page, is a Donald Trump fan.

Well, not exactly a fan. But Maureen is pulling for the big lug, for reasons neither political nor journalistic. With Maureen, it’s always personal. And the enemy of her enemy is her BFF.

I didn’t fully appreciate Maureen’s little crush on Trump ’til I saw her interview with him in the Sunday Times. It’s a weird story. Here, Maureen had in her clutches the silliest presidential candidate in U.S. electoral history. But her usually razor-sharp talons were fully retracted. She gently kid-gloved the silver-spoon blowhard through 19 insipid column inches, lobbing softballs, quoting Trump heavily, pandering to his woman troubles, not once even brushing him back from the plate and ending the whole smarmy exercise with a whimper.

What gives? Thousands of Trump’s fellow conservatives are savaging and striving to sabotage the short-fingered vulgarian who crashed their party with a whore on each arm. They’re so appalled at this “oft-bankrupt make-believe mogul clown” that they’re embracing Ted Cruz, possibly the creepiest guy — a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Gollum — ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

But Maureen kind of likes Trump. She doesn’t have to assassinate his character — partly because the mock marquis of Mar-a-lago has no discernible character in the first place, and partly because he’s a serial self-assassinator. Maureen knows he’s doomed to lose, so why get on his bad side? Besides, there’s an ulterior motive here.

Maureen, let’s remember, made her fame bashing the Clintons. In ‘99, referring to Monica Lewinsky as “a little nutty and a little slutty,” Maureen won a Pulitzer Prize for her obsessive coverage — months and months — of Bill’s White House adultery. The Clintons became the only the only topic Maureen really cared to cover. She tried to make fun of other political figures but her jibes fell flat. Like Marcie Blaine, whose only hit was “Bobby’s Girl,” Maureen keeps singing the same golden oldie, over and over again.

But showbiz is a funny thing. Trump is scorching Republican Earth and setting up Hillary as the next President Clinton. This puts Maureen, suddenly, back in the jukebox and dropping onto the turntable.

No one can explain why Maureen can’t get her mojo working on anyone but Bill and Hillary. Bill’s successor, George W. Bush, was a dangerous bungler who left the White House with the worst popular approval ever recorded. Maureen didn’t pick on Dubya — and his glassy-eyed, goody-two-shoes wife — with nearly the vitriol she poured on the Clintons. I suspect this was because she arrived late at the Bush feeding frenzy. By the time Maureen had turned her sights away from Bill, Hillary and their chosen heir, Al Gore, an army of kidders — most funnier than Maureen — was already mocking Dubya mirthfully. There were no openings on the firing squad.

Maureen could have taken this opportunity to broaden her scope. She could have become funnier or more serious, more political, more philosophical, less personal. But no. Maureen’s forté has never been politics, ideology or even laughs. Maureen’s motto is “Ad hominem.” Her weapon of choice is the sniper’s rifle.

It’s not unusual for celebrity journalists (mostly at the Times) to develop their own private cult of personality. A reporter can easily fall in love (or hate) with one public figure and lose all perspective as she daily dissects the object of her fixation. Lou Cannon, for example, the distinguished Washington Post correspondent, was seduced by Ronald Reagan, eventually competing with Rex the family spaniel to be the Gipper’s permanent lap dog.

In the opposite direction, the Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye cultivated such an animus against Al Gore that she actually created urban legends (still circulating on the Web) based on things that Gore never said or did.

In the subsequent regime, Frank Bruni’s man crush on George W. Bush produced some of the softest White House coverage in the Times’ history. Bruni, nowadays, is still atoning for his sins of gullibility.

But no contemporary journalist is identified with, and dependent upon, one political family the way Maureen has bonded — as a sort of lifesucking lamprey — with Bill and Hillary. She nurtured the immense mistrust that haunts Hillary today wherever she ventures among voters. It was Maureen who stitched Hillary to the semen-soiled hip of Monica Lewinsky, and eventually transferred the blame for that stain from Bill to Hillary. Maureen’s weird parochial-school reverse feminism has somehow laden Hillary with all the penance for Bill’s iniquities.

Through all of Bill’s misadventures, real and imagined, political and carnal, Hillary was a bystander, helpless to curb the appetites of a larger-than-life life-partner. But Maureen, from her bully pulpit in the newspaper of record, averred that Hillary’s loyalty to Bill was far more dastardly than Bill’s betrayals of his wife, family, party and nation. Hillary should have seen Monica flirting with Bill and foreseen what might happen. And done something!

Neither Maureen — who (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) explained all this — nor America will ever forgive Hillary for letting Bill listen to the tiny devil on his shoulder. Maureen’s reward for her moral vigilance is about to come due — four (or eight!) more years of Hillary to kick around.

To make sure of this, Maureen feels obliged, apparently, to flirt with Hillary’s most beatable opponent, Donald Trump. If this seems a little nutty, even a little slutty, well… it’s showbiz.